Selected Issues Papers
IMF Selected Issues Papers are prepared by IMF staff as background documentation for periodic consultations with member countries.
2025
March 26, 2025
Public Education in Belgium: Improving Outcome While Reducing Cost
Description: Educational outcomes in Belgium are comparable to peers but achieved at a higher cost. The public wage bill for education is higher than in peers, reflecting smaller student-to-teacher ratios and less teaching time. Yet, Belgium experiences teacher shortages. Reforms should aim at increasing the efficiency of public spending on education while achieving greater equality of educational outcomes and a lower skills mismatch. This would help increase the employment rate, reduce the need for firms to provide training to upgrade skills, boost productivity, and increase the creation and diffusion of innovation. Ultimately, these reforms would improve potential growth.
March 26, 2025
Firm Dynamics and Firm-Level Total Factor Productivity in Belgium: Belgium
Description: Belgium’s total factor productivity (TFP) growth slowdown since the late 1990s has been worse than peers’ despite significant spending on innovation. This is largely explained by subdued business dynamics, insufficient firm access to financing, labor and capital misallocation, and the predominance of small firms. Further product-market reforms to reduce barriers to entry and lower exit costs are needed to raise TFP. Reforming the wage-setting mechanism to better align wage and productivity developments would improve labor allocation. Deepening the European single market and advancing the capital market union would contribute to higher Belgian firm productivity and facilitate firm scale up.
March 7, 2025
Building a Knowledge-Based Economy to Boost Growth: The Role of Export Diversification in Qatar
Description: Motivated by Qatar’s Third National Development Strategy, this note discusses ingredients for boosting export diversification and growth potential. Drawing on cross-country experiences and empirical analyses, we shed light on how successful policies supported building human capital and economic complexity, the type of strategy that could best suite Qatar's circumstances, and pitfalls to avoid.
March 7, 2025
Artificial Intelligence in Qatar: Assessing the Potential Economic Impacts
Description: Qatar has been actively preparing to embrace the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI), allowing it to lead its Emerging Market peers in AI readiness. Qatar’s AI exposure has increased significantly over the years, and increasing AI adoption is assessed to yield more opportunities than risks for the country’s labor force, thanks to the private sector’s contribution in increasing jobs that are more likely to benefit from AI-driven productivity gains. Scenario analyses suggest that increasing AI adoption, supported by policy reforms to boost human capital, innovation and domestic knowledge spillovers, could generate sizeable labor productivity gains over the medium term.
March 7, 2025
Financial Conditions and Their Growth Implications for Qatar: Qatar
Description: This paper develops a Financial Conditions Index (FCI) for Qatar and uses the Growth-at-Risk (GaR) framework to examine the impact of financial conditions on Qatar’s non-hydrocarbon growth. The analysis shows that the FCI is an important leading indicator of Qatar’s non-hydrocarbon growth, highlighting its predictive potential for future economic performance. The GaR framework suggests that overall, the current downside risks to Qatar’s baseline non-hydrocarbon growth projections are relatively mild.
March 7, 2025
Estimating Fiscal Multiplier for Qatar: Qatar
Description: Econometric results suggest that Qatar’s strong capital spending multiplier became less impactful as the stock of capital rose to a high level, likely as the marginal impact declined. This supports Qatar’s strategy to shifts the State’s role to an enabler of private sector-led growth, focusing on expenditure to support build human capital and implementation of broader reform guided by the Third National Development Strategy.
March 5, 2025
Transforming the Future: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Korea
Description: This paper examines the economic impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Korea. Korea is among the global frontrunners in AI adoption, with higher adoption rates among larger, younger, and technologically advanced firms. AI holds the promise for boosting productivity and output, though the effects are more pronounced among larger and mature Korean firms. About half of jobs are exposed to AI, with higher exposures among female, younger, more educated, and higher income workers. Korea’s strong innovation and digital infrastructure highlights its AI readiness, while enhancing labor market flexibility and social safety nets are essential to fully harness AI’s potential.
March 5, 2025
Korea in a Changing Global Trade Landscape: Korea
Description: The global trade landscape is being reshaped by geoeconomic fragmentation and the rise of industrial policies. This paper studies the impact of these trends on the export-oriented Korean economy. It documents both positive and negative effects of U.S.-China trade tensions, technology and supply chain restrictions, and industrial policies of major economies on Korea's trade and FDI, particularly that of its strategic sectors. To navigate the changing global trade landscape, Korea needs to focus on promoting innovation to maintain competitiveness, diversifying export destinations and supply chains, and expanding exports of services.
February 25, 2025
Post-Pandemic Changes to Chile’s Financial Markets: Chile
Description: Pension fund withdrawals, rising public debt, and the Central Bank of Chile’s pandemic liquidity injections have reshaped Chile’s financial landscape. In the context of the diminished demand for local bonds, large non-financial corporations and the government relied more on foreign investors. Overall, Chile’s financial depth has diminished, and markets have become more volatile and sensitive to shocks. Restoring pension funds as well as continuing to strengthen market resilience and crisis response capabilities are essential for ensuring future financial stability.
February 25, 2025
Growth and Production Network in Chile: Chile
Description: Productivity growth depends not only on technological innovation but also on production networks that amplify its impact. Theory and cross-country evidence indicate a positive relationship between productivity growth and the use of intermediate inputs, a measure of network connectedness. We find that Chile’s intermediate input utilization is significantly lower than that of OECD peers, such as Korea and the Czech Republic, and declined during 2008-21. This is primarily due to weak domestic producer connections and the smaller presence of the manufacturing sector. We argue that diversifying exports from mining, reducing trade costs, and improving contract enforcement could strengthen network linkages and boost growth.